We are extremely excited and optimistic about a project we are currently doing for an oil and gas customer, which is providing power to one of their remote processing sites.
Traditionally in the oil and gas industry these power generation systems have been provided with reciprocating type generators, which have often had high maintenance intervals and not been very efficient. The system consists of a C1000 one megawatt Capstone Microturbine running on fuel gas from the customer’s facility, it also includes a 250 kilowatt solar array and Optimal’s proprietary Grid Stability Module (GSM).
In doing so we have cut the customers fuel gas use, needed for power generation, by 50% and reduced their annual fuel cost for the facility by $1 million a year. The payback of this project ends up being only about one and a half years. Even better than this, it will halve the customers carbon emissions for the site, while dramatically reducing the maintenance required. We have also doubled the service life for our system compared to business as usual. The Grid Stability Module is necessary in this case because the power demand for the site is cycling rapidly. Due to the fact that we are primarily driving oil pumps, the site load is varying by as much as 150 kilowatts a second, and most generators are not able to cope with this, so we have our GSM to reduce the impact of the cycling load.
That means the microturbine and the solar system are able to operate at their optimal efficiency, under all of the site operating conditions.
September 10, 2019